I'm having the same problem and noone seems to think this is a problem. It is really annoying! How am I supposed to update my entire collection now? If I pick my whole music folder, it will add thousands of playlists. There has to be an option to disable this behavior!?!

The current build of iTunes (10.4.1.10) appears to have a couple of issues with M3U playlists. The first is that when you import an M3U playlist, the list is created, and any files not already in the library it are added to it, but for some reason they just don't get added to the playlist. Secondly, when adding folders to the library, iTunes is also attempting to add any M3U playlists that it finds as well as any other valid media files not already in the library. The upshot is that iTunes may create a bunch of empty playlists corresponding to any M3U files you have scattered through your folders.

Use iTunes Folder Watch to scan your media folders for new files (and also for dead tracks) to avoid the issue. This is a more effective way of importing new media than simply adding in the entire media folder over and over again.

If you already have empty playlists you are struggling to delete manually then I've written a script for just that purpose called KillEmptyPlaylists.

As and when the time comes that you do want to import an M3U playlist then I have written another script to workaround the current difficulty called ImportM3U which does just what it says. It will also convert and add any WMA files present in the list on the fly whereas iTunes would normally ignore these.

As far as I know the "generates empty playlist" on import problem is fixed, but if you add folders that contain .m3u playlist files iTunes will attempt to add them to the library and start playing the playlist. It may also switch to the first track of each newly imported playlist as the import progresses, but I haven't noticed any posts on this "feature" for a while.

While it would be nice it if all worked the way that suits each of us best that isn't realistic. Repeatedly importing the same folders should not be neccessary but if, like me, you have reasons for doing so, then iTunes Folder Watch gives you more control over the process than iTunes can offer.

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